Monday, July 04, 2016

Happy Birthday, Neil Simon

Since he doesn't have a Facebook wall to write on I'll post my birthday wishes here. Neil Simon is 89 today. Truly one of my inspirations and heroes. It was a great honor hosting the Neil Simon film festival on TCM last year.

If you're an aspiring comedy writer -- TV, plays, screenplays, web series, whatever -- you owe it to yourself to study one of the absolute masters of the form. I still re-read Neil Simon plays.

I watched an episode of Sgt. Bilko this morning on DECADES in which he ended up impersonating a sailor on a Navy ship and was surprised to see Neil Simon co-wrote the episode. I checked IMDb and turns out he wrote 20 episodes. Somehow had never come across that before.

So I'm dreamin' here....what a couple of pro's from Dover could do together.....it drifts into form based on the last couple of posts....the challenge would be for you and Mistah Simon to team up on a two or three page outline for an episode of Big Bang Theory, based around the tale of the kid who blew his foot off in Central Park the other night with his homemade fireworks (totally up to you guys if he was a central character); with the secondary story being Penny's first visit to Spa Castle because she's never swimmed naked.

I wish he HAD won a ton of Tony's. Only two of his plays, "Biloxi Blues" and "Lost in Yonkers" have won that particular award. He was named Best Author (a retired category) in 1965, but "The Odd Couple" did not win Best Play that year--"The Subject Was Roses" did! And yes, he was given a special award in the 70's, but this only proves how wrong awards can be some times. Simon should easily have won several more ("Plaza Suite" and "Broadway Bound" to name only two), but I suspect he doesn't really care. The man can write.

If anyone as successful as Neil Simon can be said to be "underrated", I think he is, probably because he just makes it seem so effortless and easy - his characters are so well drawn that all those classic lines just seem to fall out of their mouths naturally, never forced, a good trick if you can do it...

... and the "FU" gag in The Odd Couple might be my favourite ever movie joke...

About KEN LEVINE

Named one of the BEST 25 BLOGS by TIME Magazine. Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. In a career that has spanned over 30 years Ken has worked on MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, WINGS, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, BECKER, DHARMA & GREG, and has co-created three series. He and his partner wrote the feature VOLUNTEERS. Ken has also been the radio/TV play-by-play voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres. and Dodger Talk. He hosts the podcast HOLLYWOOD & LEVINE

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A collection of long-form Levine

MUST KILL TV: Ken's explosive and hilarious satire of the TV industry - now in paperback and Kindle